Posts Tagged ‘king’s bounty’

“The crown prince of night meats!” is what DonerDudes.com might declare Stepney Fried Chicken’s doner kebab (£3.95 with chips and a drink). “The next morning I felt like Baudelaire on acid!” muse GreaseStain. There’s no need, of course. When the number 25 night bus deposits you in Stepney, you’ll find yourself facing Stepney Fried Chicken. You know exactly what you’ll find should you enter that door, and what you’ll get out of your purchase. No surprises, only meat.

Similarly, King’s Bounty: Dark Side has left Early Access and formally launched. It is another King’s Bounty game. You understand.

Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, monster-based monster strategy (again!) with (even more!) monsters King’s Bounty: The Dark Side.

Last week I moaned about not being able to get monsters to work together to destroy humankind. I should have just waited for this week, when King’s Bounty: The Dark Side (or just Dark Side, depending on what you’re reading) gave me the monster team-up of my dreams. Zombies, demons, vampires, orcs, goblins, imps, three-headed dogs, skeletal archers, necromancers, and even dragons, all in the mix, and more importantly all working together for monsterkind.

Resist cynicism or die. Hope. Dream. Think. Act. Be vulnerable. Open yourself to risk or you’ll never truly learn, love, or live. That hip new band may very well drop a cracking second album, I can make that Cronenbergian game controller I’ve been dreaming of, my mum shall stop hinting that I’m going to die alone in a ditch, and King’s Bounty will get an actual proper sequel rather than simply more glorified expansions.

Oh. Well. Maybe the next one after this. The next in the series will be King’s Bounty: Dark Side this summer, publishers 1C have announced. Yes, it looks like another expandalone sort of dealy rather than a game building upon King’s Bounty in bold new ways.

When people decide to give their games massive names, do they not realise how difficult it is for me to make puns about them? There’s no way I can fit Kings Bounty: Warriors Of The North and any kind of wordplay onto a single line, it simply cannot be done. I should be consulted in naming committees. Henceforth, I’m going to refer to this next in the commendably daft RPG-strategy series as King’s Bounty: Northlands, or KB: Nordic Edition. That’s what it seems to be anyway, with a new hero called Olaf who is the son of the “Northling King”. I’m guessing it’s another expansion-type thing rather than a full sequel, but there will be all new locations, units and skills, as well as valkyrie companions who are described as “gorgeous”. Perhaps that’s one of them in the screenshot above. Gorgeous, is she? You decide. It’s out Spring 2012.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled “staring aghast at irresponsible news media” to draw your attention to the RPS Twitter account. When we set it up a couple of years ago, we didn’t do a whole lot with it and thus didn’t promote it much. We reckon we’ve got the hang of it now though, so please follow @rockpapershot to get as-it-happens tip-offs to our bestest/silliest posts, occasional ranting and the odd bargain or freebie we’ve sighted. For instance, the news that the sublime King’s Bounty is currently a mere $2.50 for the next 24 hours. Goooooooooo! By the way, any other Twitter account claiming to be RPS isn’t.

You can also follow us individually, however: Alec, Jim, John and Quinns. We’re fantastically entertaining, especially when talking about the weather, cats and how tired we feel.

It takes something special to get us excited about the announcement of a new MMO, and one coming from the team behind King’s Bounty and Space Rangers is just that. We got hold of Katauri Interactive’s boss, Dmitry Gusarov, to ask about Royal Quest, finding out how they’re making their hobby their business, their plans for payment models, aims for Diablo-style speed, and how they hope their games are all cosy and understandable.

Oops. This was intended to be an initial impressions post rather than a Wot I Think, as I didn’t have the time to give Crossworlds enough of a shake for a verdict. Or so I thought, in my guilelessness. This is a King’s Bounty game, though. It’s a strategy-roleplaying mash-up that plum doesn’t care whether you have time or not. Show it even a hint of your soul and it’ll eat it, with a beaming smile but without any remorse whatsoever.

So here I am, far too many hours later: exhausted, behind on a frightening number of chores, fascinating webgames and half-hearted calls to family members, but merrily game-sated and with my pointy finger of judgement all ready to go. I’ve missed you, Kingy-kins.Read the rest of this entry »

It’s thanks to Alec that I played King’s Bounty. Seeing turn-based combat in KB: The Legend my “Ew! Strategy!” alarms went off and I moved on to the next game on the list. But having read Alec’s My Zombie Wife piece, I felt I should give it a go. It’s fabulous. So when exploring the retro-weighed shelves of a nearby gaming store, finding the original King’s Bounty for sale meant a guaranteed buy. Except, well, it was on Megadrive. “Traitor!” shouted Kieron at me, repeatedly, all last week as I played. I’ve written all about it, and it’s almost entirely true for the DOS version too – a game I heartily recommend getting hold of. And the Megadrive version emulates beautifully on PC, I found out when taking screenshots after playing it for a few days on a real Megadrive on a television with a refresh rate low enough to give me a headache. There’s no good to be found in traiting. You can read my Eurogamer retrospective here, where I find much love and happiness in the game. A game with the most brutal game over message I’ve ever seen.

“Oh Mad Mohan,

You have failed to recover the Sceptre of Order in time to save the land! Beloved King Maximus has died and the Demon King Urthrax Killspite rules in his place. The Four Continents lay in ruin about you, its people doomed to a life of misery and oppression because you could not find the Sceptre.”